How to find orientation of a column?

[Anonymous]

How is the rotation angle for a skewed framing member accessed?

For example if a W shaped beam is to be placed in a floor system with weak axis loaded, i.e. rotated 90 degrees, how is that rotation angle retrieved from the API data?

[Anonymous]

To get the rotation angle for a column, get the Location from the FamilyInstance, which will be a LocationPoint for columns. From the LocationPoint, you can get the Rotation (which is in radians).

I'm not sure how to do it for beams, whose Location will be LocationCurve.

[Anonymous]

Exactly. To be precise check out following code:

FilteredElementCollector collector = new FilteredElementCollector(Global.doc()).WhereElementIsNotElementType().OfCategory(BuiltInCategory.OST_StructuralColumns); // select all structural columns
List<Element> allcolumnList = collector.ToList(); // select all structural columns as a List
LocationPoint locPoint;
locPoint = columnList[i].Location as LocationPoint;
rotation = locPoint.Rotation;

[jlpgy]

Hi:

FamilyInstance.GetTransform() can return a Transform which stands for the transformation from Family coordinate system to .rvt project coordinate system.

LocationPoint.Rotation is not always what you really want. For example, strctural columns, which are not necessarily vertical. Besides, structural columns has Location property as <LocationCurve>, which has not Rotation property.